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Just ahead of next week's launch of openSUSE 11.2, the open source community has posted three variations on a really green theme and invited openSUSE users and FOSS community members to choose the one they like best.

The choices are:

On launch day of the much-anticipated release of openSUSE 11.0, we caught up with openSUSE Product Manager Michael L￶ffler to ask him about the distro's newest features, how they made installation so darn fast, and whether openSUSE works on micro-computers.

There's a new version of Parallels Desktop for Mac available that adds more support for Linux users. According to MacNN, Build 5608 adds support for guest Parallels Tools for Linux in the latest Linux distributions (including Ubuntu 8).

Bryan Che, part of the project management team at Red Hat, started a new project at Fedora this week called Nightlife. Based on the University of Wisconsin-Madison's Condor Project, Nightlife will give people the ability to donate idle capacity from their own computers to an open, general-purpose Fedora-run grid for processing socially beneficial work and scientific research that requires access to large amounts of computing power.

MindTouch announced yesterday a new incremental release of Deki Wiki 8.05.1 (Jay Cooke) ahead of next week's final release of its popular open source collaboration platform. In addition to general performance improvements, Deki Wiki 8.05.1 also includes new functionality like single sign-on utilizing Apache/IIS authentication modules (experimental) which... allows for easy integration with auth systems like NTLM...

Day four of Ubuntu Open Week was packed with tons of terrific information about various aspects of the Ubuntu project, including getting the popular Linux distribution running on an Eee PC, Packaging in Python, and what the future of the desktop looks like.

It was no surprise that one of the biggest draws of the day was the Q & A session with Ubuntu's founder Mark Shuttleworth. He had plenty to say about the next phase of the project and what users can expect to see in future versions of the distro.

People attending day three of Ubuntu Open Week today were treated to a full day of of some of the most diverse sessions yet. We've been following the event this week, which consists of IRC sessions on many topics.

Today, from a Q & A session featuring Community Manager Jono Bacon, to a look at how to produce podcasts in Ubuntu, there were all sorts of cool things to learn about during the course of another busy program at the online conference.

Ubuntu Open Week continued today with a number of presentations aimed at developers and software engineers. As mentioned before here, the week consists of IRC get-togethers online on a whole range of different topics, many of them pertaining to the new release of Ubuntu.

As the event continued, there were also sessions that offered inside looks at teams within the Ubuntu community and how they work together to create server software and manage security.

If you want to learn more about what it's like to be a part of an open source community but can't figure out where to jump in, Ubuntu Open Week is a great place to start. The yearly event features online meetings via IRC, where people with all levels of experience gather to hear presentations from other community members on a wide range of topics from triaging bugs to how to produce podcasts with Ubuntu. Have a look at the Ubuntu wiki for a complete schedule of events and be sure to check back here each day as we take a look at the day's highlights.

The tech community moves one step closer to a clearer picture of just how widespread the use of open source software is with today's launch of the Open Source Census by software vendor OpenLogic.

The Open Source Census bills itself as the first collaborative, global project to count the number of installations for each open source software package. What can we hope to learn from the information collected? Apparently, quite a lot.